Smooth Talking Stranger Read Free

door.
    One night Roger tapped at the door for nearly ten minutes.
    “Come on, Tara. Let me in, or I won’t buy you any more presents. I just want to talk to you. Tara—” He pushed harder at the door, and the chair creaked in protest. “I was nice to you the other day, wasn’t I? I told you I loved you. But I won’t be nice anymore if you don’t move that chair out of the way. Open it, Tara, or I’ll tell your mama you’ve been acting up. You’ll get punished.”
    My little sister curled into a ball against me, trembling. She put her hands over her ears. “Don’t let him in, Ella,” she whispered. “Please.”
    I was scared, too. But I pulled the covers around Tara and got out of bed. “She’s sleeping,” I said, loud enough for the monster at the door to hear.
    “Open it, you little bitch!” The hinges rattled as he pushed harder. Where was my mother? Why wasn’t she doing anything?
    In the feeble glow of a Rainbow Brite night-light, I frantically rummaged beneath the bed for the craft box where we kept our art supplies. My fingers curved around the cold handles of a pair of metal scissors. We used them to cut out paper dolls, pictures from magazines, and cereal box tops.
    I heard the thud of impact as Roger put his shoulder to the door, so hard that the chair began to crack. Between each thud, I heard the sound of my sister weeping. Adrenaline raced through me, sending my heartbeat into a drumming fury. Panting, I went to the door, gripping the scissors. Another thud, another, with sounds of wood vibrating and splintering. Light from the hallway shot into the room as Roger shoved the door wide enough to get his hand in. But as he began to push the chair aside, I darted forward and stabbed his hand with the pair of scissors. I felt the sickening give of metal penetrating something pliant. There was a muted roar of pain and fury, and then . . . nothing . . . except the sound of retreating footsteps.
    Still gripping the scissors, I got back into bed with Tara. “I’m scared,” my little sister had wept, soaking the shoulder of my nightgown with her tears. “Don’t let him get me, Ella.”
    “He won’t,” I had said, stiff and shaking. “If he comes back, I’ll stick him like a pig. You go to sleep, now.”
    And she had slept huddled against me all night, while I stayed awake, my heart jolting every time I heard a noise.
    In the morning, Roger had left our house for good.
    Mom never asked either of us about that night, or what had happened, or how we felt about Roger’s abrupt departure from our lives. The only thing she ever said about it was, “You will never get a new daddy. You don’t deserve one.”
    There had been other men after that, some of them bad, but never quite as bad as Roger.
    And the strangest part of all was that Tara didn’t remember Roger, or the night I had stabbed his hand with the scissors. She was bewildered when I told her about it a few years later. “Are you sure?” she had asked with a puzzled frown. “Maybe you dreamed it.”
    “I had to wash the scissors the next morning,” I told her. It frightened me that she looked so blank. “There was blood on them. And the chair was cracked in two places. You don’t remember?”
    Tara had shaken her head, mystified.
    After that experience, after the parade of men who never stayed, I was leery and gun-shy, afraid to trust any man. But as Tara had gotten older, she had gone the other way. For her there were innumerable partners, and prolific sex. And I wondered how much real pleasure, if any, she had gotten out of it.
    The urge to protect and care for Tara had never left me. During our teen years, I had driven to strange places in the night to pick her up where a boyfriend had stranded her . . . I had given her my waitressing money to buy a prom dress . . . I had taken her to the doctor to get birth control pills. She had been fifteen at the time.
    “Mom says I’m a slut,” Tara whispered to me in the doctor’s